Best way to prune - but not lose - bloated Contacts?

Question

Level 1

19 points

Best way to prune - but not lose - bloated Contacts?

Despite merging duplicate cards, my Mac contacts database has grown unwieldly.

I’ve got ~ 7,000 contacts in my icloud contacts, but less than a 1,000 are really in any way active or relevant. What is the best way to clean this up?

Keep in mind, I may not want to entirely delete all my old contacts from my database as they may contain info that I’ll need at a future date (e.g. kids names, where met etc.). But I don’t need them constantly in view. Is there such a thing as having an active and an inactive address book? I’d love to be able to go to the inactive one and retrieve that vcf from my database if that contact becomes active.

Is there an ability to sort on “creation date” or perhaps “last viewed” date (if there is such a thing) and then tick all of those that I don’t need and export them to, say, an “OnMyMac” database and then, if they’re relevant, bring any of those back into my active contacts database? But then again, with so many OS changes and even hardware upgrades, even the creation date, or last viewed, or import date is not reliable. And besides, I’d want my inactive contacts available on other macs.

Anybody have any workable solutions apart from going through and pruning contacts alphabetically?

Thanks!

Posted on Dec 9, 2017 8:28 AM

Reply

Answer 1

tygb

Level 9

64,588 points

Dec 9, 2017 11:14 AM in response to RumiKern

Open address book via spotlight , take cursor on top menu bar , click on file - new group , create two groups separately and name as “ Home “ and “ Work “ .

Go to All contacts under iCloud section , select some contacts , move cursor from bottom to top to select part of contacts so that all of them would not be selected , once they are highlighted , press command and C on the keyboard , then take cursor on " Home " , click once over it and press command and V to paste it .

The data will be transferred , another scenario if you want selective individual contacts to be transferred drag and drop to the folder created as “ Home “ .

And then follow the steps right click on Home > export Group v card .

A pop up window appears , click on new folder name it as " active contacts " giving an example you can name it as per your choice , choose a location as Documents - iCloud and click on save .

After some time open finder under iCloud section > Documents > the folder name " active contacts " will be saved as home.vcf right click on it and open with as contacts.app ( default ) .

If there are duplicates it will show like this .

And click on review Duplicate .

But you said in your question don't need duplicates , so click on second option with green ( new ) and click on last option update and finally click on " import " button in the bottom .

You can follow the same procedure with " work " folder but keep in mind when you create an untitled folder create some different name example " not useful contacts " .

So that later you can differentiate them easily .

Reply